Chapter 24 #2
The Volkovs were Bratva too, but not the kind men joked about over vodka or dressed up in legitimate paperwork for polite rooms. The Volkovs were the old kind.
Vicious. Impatient. Brutal enough that even men raised around blood lowered their voices when speaking of them.
They did not only kill. They erased. They made examples out of families and called it discipline.
They had killed our parents in Moscow.
A bombing. Years ago now. Sergei had been there that night.
He had walked out alive. Our parents had not.
He never spoke of the fire, the street, the bodies, or whatever he saw in those first minutes after the blast. We never forced him to.
Family learned, eventually, that some wounds were not secrets.
They were graves. You did not dig them up just because you loved the person buried beside them.
I stared at the record until the numbers blurred.
This was not proof. Not yet.
But it was the first time Orlov money had appeared anywhere near the Volkov name and the night that destroyed my family.
A payment path. A dead shell. A buried connection.
A thread.
And for the first time, I wondered if what happened in Moscow had not been random brutality at all.
I wondered if it had been arranged.
I gathered what I could. This was not something I could keep from my brothers—not with what it might mean about Moscow, about our parents, about the night Sergei had walked out of a fire and never spoke of it again.
But I would not bring it to Maxim half-formed.
If I was wrong, I would have raised a ghost for nothing.
If I was right, I would need more than a payment path and a name to say it out loud.
Kit woke at 1:07.
I heard the shift before she spoke. A rustle of sheets, a quiet intake of breath, then the small pause that meant she had found the coffee.
“You made me coffee,” she called, voice rough with sleep.
“Yes.”
“This is suspiciously nice.”
“I am a suspiciously nice man.”
“You are absolutely not. You spank very hard.”
I went to the bedroom doorway, smiling. She sat propped against the pillows with my shirt slipping off one shoulder, hair messy around her face, coffee in hand. The look she gave me was soft for less than a second before she remembered what was at stake.
I crossed to the bed and handed her the tablet.
She read the first headline without speaking.
Then the second. Then she opened the attached timeline, the one that laid out Daniel’s last known movements, the Seaport connection, the warehouse, the money chain, the witness discrepancy.
Her face went still in a way I knew now meant the feeling had gone too deep for expression.
I sat on the edge of the bed, far enough not to crowd her. She read everything twice. When she finally lowered the tablet, her eyes were a bit glassy.
“He’s going to know it was me,” she said.
“Yes.”
“That’s not going away.”
“No.”
“I can’t just go back to my apartment and my crosswords like this is over.”
“No, you cannot.”
The words were simple. I did not soften them. She did not need softness there. She needed the truth with its spine intact. She took a sip of coffee and looked at me over the rim of her coffee mug.
“Is that your version of asking me to stay?”
“Yes.”
Her mouth twitched, though there was no humor in it yet. “That is a terrible way to ask.”
“I am aware.”
“Are you?”
“Yes.”
“You’re basically saying, Mikhail Orlov might kill you, therefore move in with me.”
“When summarized badly, yes.”
“When summarized accurately.”
I inclined my head. “Also yes.”
She looked down at the coffee, then toward the windows where the city had gone bright and indifferent beyond the glass. The news had broken. Daniel’s name was public. Mikhail had been ruined. Nothing about her life could return to the way it was before.
I watched her realize that. I did not try to rescue her from the realization and that was the hardest kind of care.
After a while, she said, “I need my own workstation.”
“You’ll have it.”
“Not a guest laptop. Mine. Set up how I want.”
“Yes.”
“No more files on me I don’t know about.”
I held her gaze. “Yes.”
“No decisions made about my safety that I don’t at least get informed of, unless I am literally unconscious.”
A pause.
Her eyebrows lifted.
I said, “I will do my best.”
“Wrong answer.”
“It is the honest one. If there is an immediate physical threat against you, I will move first and explain after.”
Her jaw tightened.
“So will you,” I added.
That made her pause. Then she sighed. “Fine. Emergency exception. Narrowly defined.”
“Agreed.”
“I need Daniel’s file copied to my system and one physical copy kept somewhere that is not controlled only by your family.”
“Yes.”
“I need to be able to leave.”
“You can leave.”
She gave me a look.
I corrected myself. “You can leave with a protection plan.”
“That sounds like a committee with guns.”
“It is.”
“I hate it.”
“I know.”
“And I need you to stop saying I know every time I’m trying to be difficult.”
“No.”
She stared at me. Then, unexpectedly, she smiled.
“Fine,” she said. “I’ll stay.”
Satisfaction moved through me, immediate and profound.
“Yes,” I said. “You will.”
Her eyes narrowed at once. “Do not be so satisfied with yourself.”
“No.”
“Ivan.”
“No,” I repeated, letting the warmth show because she had earned the truth of it. “I am.”
She pointed at me with the coffee mug. “You are unbearable.”
“Yes.”
“And if you say good girl right now, I’m throwing this coffee at you.”
I leaned closer. “Then finish drinking it for Daddy first. You need the caffeine.”
She laughed. The sound was tired and brief and everything I wanted from the day.
By late afternoon, she was back in my bed with her laptop open across her thighs, still wearing my shirt, her legs tucked beneath the blanket and her hair pinned up with the blue pen I had returned.
She had reclaimed it without ceremony. One moment it sat on the nightstand beside her coffee, and the next it was twisted through her hair where it belonged, the chewed cap visible above the dark knot. The sight did something to me.
Outside, Boston kept moving. Inside, my girl worked from my bed with her hair pinned up, Daniel’s name in the world at last, Mikhail Orlov wounded beyond recovery, and a new thread waiting in a file marked for Sergei.
The story was not finished. It never was.
But for the first time since I found a ghost in Orlov’s systems, the room around me felt exactly as it should.
Because my little girl was finally mine.